by Amy Greene
“Myra Jean Lamb,” he said. “Your granddaddy would skin you alive if he caught you up here messing around. And you boys ought to get a switching, too.”
The three of us stood in a line gaping up at him. I was half afraid he would take matters into his own hands and do the switching himself. He frowned down at us, maybe waiting for one of us to speak up, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. Then Myra burst out crying, which was a surprise to me. She wasn’t prone to tears.
“Here, now,” Mr. Barnett said, softening right away. “I didn’t mean to make you squall. But I told Byrdie and Macon I’d always watch over you. What would they think if I let you fall down a dadburn hole?” He put his big hand on top of Myra’s head and she dried her eyes hard on her sleeve. I knew she was embarrassed to have cried.
“Please,” she said. “Don’t tell Granddaddy, okay?”
“I won’t this time,” he said. “But don’t you younguns be messing around that old cistern anymore. Now come on to the house. Margaret’s made banana bread.”
I looked back to where the chimney swift floated, the loneliness of its corpse still tearing at me. I was sorry to leave it behind but I wanted to follow Mr. Barnett. If it was true that he swore to watch over Myra, we were in on something together now.
BYRDIE
One morning I woke up with the thresh. My mouth was broke out so thick with sores I couldn’t hardly swallow. Della said, “Ain’t but one thing’ll take care of this.”
Mammy was standing over my bed looking worried. “What?” she asked.
“A man that’s never laid eyes on his father.”
“Who’ll we take her to?” Myrtle asked, standing in the doorway with her hand on her hip. She looked blurry to me. My mouth hurt so bad I couldn’t see straight.
“Clifford Pinkston’s the closest,” Grandmaw said, leaning over to rub my hair.
“You can’t tell me Clifford Pinkston never seen his daddy,” Mammy said. “I went to school with him and I seen his daddy my own self a hundred times.”
“Howard Pinkston ain’t Clifford’s daddy,” Grandmaw said. She was done getting her headscarf on. “He was an orphan and the Pinkstons took him to raise.” She turned back to me and when she smiled I felt a little better. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll get you fixed up right quick. Clifford just lives down the holler a piece.”
I had seen Clifford’s house before, on the way to other places. It was about two miles from ours, perched on the edge of a bluff near the bottom of the holler, a weathered three-story with a boarded-up window on the top floor and a wraparound porch that sagged down in the back, overlooking a patch of rocky farmland. There was always goats and geese and peacocks strutting around in the yard. In winter I could see his chimney smoke puffing up through the trees. Grandmaw told me on the walk that he lived by hisself because he was too backward to get him a woman. Mammy said she didn’t believe he ever said two or three words when they was in school together.
“What makes you think he’ll help us?” Mammy asked.
“Why, Clifford’s always been a good neighbor,” Grandmaw said.
He was out on the yard splitting wood when me and Mammy and Grandmaw came up. He took off his hat when he seen us. My mouth hurt too bad to think about much but I took note of the fine figure Clifford cut when he stood up straight. He was long and tall with strong brown arms. I could see his muscles with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. When we got close my nerves went away because of how kind his face was.
“Hello there, Clifford,” Grandmaw said.
“Hidee, Miss Ruth,” he said.
Then he nodded to Mammy. His face and ears turned red.
“How are you making it, Clifford?” Mammy said. “It’s been a long time since we was in school together.” She smiled and I pictured her as a girl. It crossed my mind that Clifford might think she was pretty. It made me feel funny to think of my mammy as a woman and not just the one who bore me. I wasn’t used to seeing her around men her own age. My daddy died when I was a baby, so I didn’t remember them being together.
“This’n here’s got the thresh,” Grandmaw said, and set me out in front of him by the shoulders. “I was hoping we could trouble you to help us out.”
The way Clifford looked at Mammy, I knowed he wouldn’t refuse her anything. Then he looked down and studied me real good. I felt a warmness spreading in my heart like I never knowed before. He had the kindest eyes I ever seen. He seemed familiar someway. I had the queerest thought that he was my daddy, even though I knowed my daddy was dead. He knelt down before me so our faces was close. I could smell his sweat where he’d been working in the heat. I stood still as I could, waiting to see what would happen. He took hold of my face so gentle, and it was like I always needed to be touched that way by a man’s fingers, after all them years being raised by women.
“Open your mouth, Byrdie,” Mammy said. Her voice was thick and fuzzy, like it sounded when she woke up in the mornings. It seemed to me like the world had quit turning and Mammy must have felt it, too. I did as she said and Clifford leaned in to cover my lips with his own. He blowed warm wind in my mouth and down my swelled-up throat. I could feel my lungs filling up with it. It was such a relief someway that I wanted to squall. He pulled back from me, still holding my face, and we looked for a while in each other’s eyes. It seemed like even the birds in the trees had quit making noise. Then Grandmaw said, “Well, that ort to do it.” I looked up at her and Mammy standing over us. Mammy’s face was white as a sheet. She was staring at Clifford with something like worship in her eyes. She’d felt the power of what he done the same as I did.
“Why don’t you come up and eat supper with us tonight?” Mammy asked. Her voice still sounded far off. “It’s the least we can do to thank ye.”
“Maybe tomorrow night,” Clifford said, and I could tell Mammy was disappointed. She probably figured he never would come.
Sure enough, the next day when I got out of the bed my thresh had cleared up. I was feeling better, setting out on the porch playing with a doll, when I looked up and seen Clifford coming. He waved his hat and I ran to tell Grandmaw and Mammy.
“Well, I’ll be,” Grandmaw said. “I never dreamt he’d turn up.” It was true Clifford was backward, but he was so struck on Mammy he couldn’t resist her. Pretty soon he was coming to supper just about every night, and bringing me and Mammy presents. He took us to town and the fair and all kinds of places. I got to where I loved that man just about better than anything, and so did Mammy. When he asked Mammy to be his wife a few months later, I reckon I was more tickled than she was. I got to wear baby’s breath in my hair to the wedding. After the knot was tied, I figured I had a new daddy. I started calling Clifford “Pap,” and all of us was happy.
DOUG
Besides Myra, Haskell Barnett was my only friend. After he pulled Myra away from that cistern, we were allies in my mind. The Barnetts’ grown children had moved up north and they were lonesome for the sound of small voices, so they treated Myra and me like their own flesh and blood. We loved playing at their house. Mrs. Barnett was always baking and Mr. Barnett showed us how to build forts and shoot with slingshots. Mark stopped visiting once he got older, but Myra and I still went there even after we were grown. Sometimes Myra and Mrs. Barnett embroidered or cooked together while I helped Mr. Barnett with the outside chores. He paid me but he didn’t have to. It was nice being alone with him. He was quiet when I needed him to be, but he also told good stories.
When I was eleven, we took our first walk together. All afternoon I had handed him tools as he worked under his truck, until he slid out into the springtime sun and said, “I need to stretch my legs. You want to come with me?” We went far up the mountain, but not to the top because the way was too rugged and steep. Not even Daddy ventured to the summit anymore, after breaking his leg as a boy. Daddy said there was a grassy bald on top of Bloodroot Mountain where his grandfather used to drive his cattle to. It was a dangerous trip but the high mountain grass was better f
or the cows and it was cooler up there in summer. Walking with Mr. Barnett, I wondered if my greatgrandfather’s motivations had less to do with his cows and more to do with spending time alone where it was quiet, away from his duties on the farm. I thought about Daddy’s story, how one day he decided to see the top, even after he’d been forbidden. He fell trying to scale the steep cliffs and lay for a day and a night before he was found. He claimed to have seen some frightening things while he was lying up there but wouldn’t say what, only that if I ever went farther than the big rock over the bluff, he’d skin me alive. I never would have risked it, but sometimes I dreamed of my great-grandfather driving his cows up those rocky slopes to reach a meadow that must have been like paradise to him.
The woods looked different walking with Mr. Barnett than when I was alone. At the time the change was hard to understand, but looking back I see why. It was because he still observed the mountain with wonder, even though he knew it better than I did. As we passed through dark patches of shade into clearings like rooms of light, he paused to touch ridges of fungus growing on bark, stopped to catch a moth and study its wings, bent to pick up an arrowhead. When I was with him I saw it too, how magical everything was.
We came to a place where the cottonwoods were thick, shedding their seeds in drifting white tufts. Small clouds floated all around us like something from a dream, lighting on Mr. Barnett’s shoulders and the top of his head, where the graying hair was still matted down from his cap. We stood watching for a while, faces lifted to the sun. “Look, Douglas,” he said. “How pretty it is. Makes me think about the Lord.”
His words made my arms prickle with goosebumps. I understood what he meant so well that, after a few seconds of holding my breath, I couldn’t resist telling him my secret. “That’s how I feel about Myra,” I said, closing my eyes so I didn’t have to see his face. “She makes me think about Jesus.” I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He put his hand on my shoulder. He must have already known. From then on, we took walks together at least once a week. The only thing I couldn’t tell Myra was how much I loved her, so I told Mr. Barnett all about it instead. He never said I was too young to be in love, even though I was only eleven. When I told him how I felt about Myra, he believed me.
I didn’t expect before I started talking how much there was to tell, but Mr. Barnett didn’t mind. He knew I needed our walks and he made time for them. I poured my heart out to him a thousand times over the years, not bothering in those cool autumn evenings or snow-dusted mornings or shade-speckled summer afternoons to cover my broken tooth. He didn’t look at me anyway. That’s what made it so easy to talk to him when I could barely say two words to anyone else but Myra. It was how he reached out to touch a leaf with a worm inching across it, how he bent to examine a hoof mark or paw print, how he plucked a persimmon and popped it into his mouth, as if he wasn’t listening. But he always was. “She’ll come around, Douglas,” he’d say. “One of these days.”
I didn’t do all the talking on our walks. He told me stories, mostly about the times he had with Myra’s grandparents growing up. When Mr. Barnett lost his older brother in the war, Macon Lamb was the closest thing he had to one. Since he was the only boy left in a house full of sisters, he was always at Macon’s heels. “He’s the one taught me how to smoke and chew both,” Mr. Barnett said. “Some people didn’t like him because he was quiet, and they took that for hateful. But I knowed the kind of man he really was. He’d do things you didn’t expect, like whittle something and give it to you for a present. One time I caught him off by hisself hid in the corn patch, reading a book of poems. His face got red as a beet and he flew so mad I thought he was going to fight me, just because I knowed he liked to read poems. But Macon never stayed mad for long.”
Mr. Barnett talked about Myra’s granny, too. He said he could see why Macon was drawn to Byrdie, even though she wasn’t much to look at. She was brash and sassy and tough. “I seen her bury every one of her children and take to her bed for months at a time,” Mr. Barnett said. “But someway she always got back on her feet. It was Macon that never got over it. Since their youngest, Clio, got killed, he’s been scared to death something might happen to the baby she left behind. Myra’s the only thing he’s got left of Clio. That’s why he watches over that youngun like a hawk.”
I loved hearing stories about Myra as a baby, how Macon and Byrdie doted on her. Mr. Barnett said they worked hard to make a good home for her to grow up in, and I can’t think of a better one than what they had. It’s pretty all over Bloodroot Mountain, but the Lambs have the best spot. When the trees are bare you can see far into the woods from their back steps, and from the front window you can look down on the winding dirt road and the creek rushing alongside it. Mr. Barnett still liked to walk up the mountain on summer evenings and sit in Byrdie and Macon’s yard, drinking sweet tea or lemonade and talking about the Bible way into the night. “I can remember watching Myra toddle around when she was a baby, catching lightning bugs,” he told me once. “She’d come running to show us how they lit up her hands.” He stopped walking then to look at me. “I can see why you love her, Douglas,” he said. “That little girl is special.” It seemed like he was trying to tell me something, but I was afraid to ask what it was.
BYRDIE
It was sad to leave our cabin with the haint blue door and go live with Pap on his farm, even as much as I loved him. We still seen Grandmaw and the great-aunts but it wasn’t the same. Me and Mammy lived there on Pap’s farm until I was fifteen years old, when Grandmaw died. It was an awful time and after we buried her we got to where we couldn’t hardly stand Chickweed Holler and all the memories there. Pap said one day maybe we ort to move down to the valley. He’d struggled so long with the rocky soil on his farm, he believed he could do better somewhere else. Me and Mammy agreed to it because we needed to run away from our grief. Much as we cared for Della and Myrtle, it was hard to be around them without missing Grandmaw so bad it liked to killed us. Pap got word of land for sale about sixty miles east, in a little farming community called Piney Grove. He bought ten acres off a man named Bucky Cochran that owned a big dairy farm and everything else along the five-mile stretch of road between our place and his house, a two-story yellow brick with white trim and fancy columns on the porch. Pap built us a log cabin with a loft where I slept in a feather bed Mammy made for me. Every day I’d slip off from my chores to set by the springhouse where we kept a jug of fresh milk tied up in the ice-cold spring. I’d pull it up out of the water and close my eyes and take a long drink and it seemed like nothing in life could taste sweeter. I thought it was the prettiest plot of land I ever seen, too, until I came up here to Bloodroot Mountain.
I took a job cooking and cleaning for Bucky’s wife, Barbara Cochran, and we found us a church not far from the house. That’s where I seen Macon for the first time. I never was good-looking like Myra, even before I got real old. My ears stuck out and I had a good head of hair but it had an ugly color to it, like dirty dishwater. It’s a wonder Macon took to me, but he wasn’t no looker hisself. Had a puckered face and scraggly whiskers and a brown birthmark over his eye shaped like an island off of the globe I seen at the Cochrans’ house. Every chance I got I’d sneak and spin that globe and run my fingers over the shapes. Macon’s birthmark put me in mind of all them shapes that stood for places I’d like to go. Sometimes the soles of my feet still itched in the night. Up until he died I had that island to run my fingers over whenever I wanted to.
Piney Grove Church was about two miles down the road from us, and about the same from the foot of Bloodroot Mountain. I guess you could say me and Macon met in the middle. He caught my eye right off, setting over in the amen corner with suspenders on. I’ve thought about what drawed me to Macon, besides that island birthmark, and I believe it was being able to tell right off that he was a man. He wasn’t but eight years older than me but there was something about the way he carried hisself. He’d give his sisters stern looks when they went to giggling o
n the back pew, and every time he led prayer his voice rung up in the rafters. I could tell just by setting in the church house with Macon that he’d know how to treat a woman and run a farm and be a good daddy like Pap. Even though I was only fifteen, I knowed I wanted to marry a man like him.
That’s how come I stood close to him every chance I got and tried to get myself noticed. Seemed like it took forever for him to figure out I was around. Then finally at the Easter egg hunt me and him and some of the other older ones was picked to hide the eggs. It was springtime and chilly out. The churchyard grass was bright green and slick with dew. My feet was wet in them thin shoes I had on, but I couldn’t hardly feel it. All I knowed was Macon Lamb being close by. Every once in a while I’d ease up on him, like I was hiding another egg, and catch a whiff of his soapy-smelling skin.
I seen him pass through the gate to the graveyard and finally he was off by hisself. The others headed around back of the church where the trees and outhouses was, so it was just me and Macon. I went with my egg basket amongst the tombstones, some of them old enough to where the names was rubbed off. Such a quiet came over me, with the sky blue and the birds singing. There’s always something peaceful about a graveyard.
Macon was bent over hiding an egg at the base of a stone carved like a lamb. It was a child’s grave and I’ve wondered more than once if that wasn’t the Lord warning me and Macon of things to come. I crept up behind him and said, “I didn’t know we could hide these out here.” I liked to scared him to death. He jumped sky high and both of us laughed. Then he stood there looking at me funny, eyes twinkling like they did when he was up to mischief. “I reckon we can,” he said. “Nobody told me any different.”
“Well,” I said. “Where do you reckon would be a good place to hide this’n?” My mouth was dry as a bone. I was holding up this nice pink egg, I still remember it. That’s when Macon finally noticed me. We hid the rest of them eggs together.